Talk:Cross-dressing

More common term

The statement the Anglo-Saxon-rooted term "cross-dresser" has largely superseded the Latin-origin term "transvestite" ought to be an empirical verifiable fact, but risks looking like desired prescriptivism. Google ngrams does not seem to support the statement. The three references look as if they say what they think should be used or is used by right-thinking people rather than what is used in general. 2A00:23C6:148A:9B01:5C5A:1B03:C6BA:40A7 (talk) 13:17, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for that; always good to verify one's hunches by checking the data. The answer you get, though, depends a fair bit on what you ask for. If you look at these terms, and compare AE and BE, it's not so clear. The other factor, is that ngrams is based solely on books, and doesn't include other sources, such as journals, and reliable magazines and web sites. Still, "largely superseded" doesn't match the three sources, either. I've removed that expression. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 03:45, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

The results linked to for ngrams have excluded the term cross-dresser altogether (Ngrams not found: cross-dresser). They are only comparing transvestite with crossdresser. And of course, crossdresser (with no hyphen) is less accurate and less common than the form with a hyphen. Google ngrams does not seem to work correctly with hyphenated terms.

A cursory Google search shows "cross-dresser OR crossdresser" as having ~92 million results, and "transvestite" having ~40 million results. That seems about right, and what we would expect in the 21st century. Hist9600 (talk) 05:47, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

The original search by the IPv6 used incorrect placement of the hyphen and excludes cross-dresser, but this search includes it, and does show that transvestite is much more common than cross-dresser in books. However, you have to examine the actual sources, not just the count, to see whether they are reliable sources or not. For example, in the list of books at the ngrams link for "transvestites" for the period 2015-2019, all of the top ten books in the list are pornography, with titles such as "Transvestite Hooker from Detroit", "Transvestite Sissy Candy Tied Up in Pink Panties", "Classic Transvestite Candy in Pictures", "Mistress X Transvestite Dominatrix", and "Transvestite In Chains". It's not till you get to #15 that there's a reliable-looking source ("Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s-1930s"). So, the raw tally from ngrams, although much higher for transvestite, cannot be used. A far as hit counts in Google, there are neither 92M nor 40M results for those; that's not even close to the correct tally. Stick to reliable sources, which includes reliable published books, academic journals, and selected magazines and web sites. Using the tally that you get from Google web search is highly misleading. Mathglot (talk) 18:55, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Well, what's the method used to determine these things? Popularity? Popularity in reliable sources, which are ambiguously defined? At least GLAAD and the APA style guide are saying that transvestite is now considered offensive. That's not the end-all-be-all, but any review of what is common / standard, should include a variety of criteria.

• https://www.glaad.org/reference/trans-terms
• https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/bias-free-language/gender

Hist9600 (talk) 19:42, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

A number of things. It's laid out in our policy on Article titles, and in particular, section #Deciding on an article title, which includes five WP:CRITERIA. "Popularity" is, indeed, one of them, at least if you take that word as a rough proxy for the WP:COMMONNAME recognizability criterion on that page. Having that policy to hand is one thing, and applying it by trying to figure out what is most common/popular/recognizable is quite another, as the initial attempts using ngrams makes clear. But in general, yes, if we could get an accurate sense on what the most common term is in reliable sources, then we should normally follow that. One way to do that, is via WP:TERTIARY sources (encyclopedias, college intro textbooks, and the like) which normally distill the majority viewpoint of secondary sources, because by definition, that's what they do. If we have a few good tertiary sources we trust and they agree, then in theory that saves us from having to check hundreds or thousands of secondary sources.

However, there is one other thorn to deal with, and it could be a deal-breaker. Things like WP:COMMONNAME and the other criteria only are relevant when both terms in question both name the same thing, otherwise, there's no point in comparing usage. We can dicker about whether to call that thing in your garage a car or an automobile, and questions of popularity or WP:COMMONNAME come into it. However, if we were talking about merging Car and Sedan, then the fact that "car" is much more common does not mean we should merge the two and call it "car"; it means nothing at all and is irrelevant, because they are two different topics, albeit closely related in a hypernym/hyponym relationship, therefore, no merge of those two. So one question here, is: do these two terms represent the same thing? Because if they don't, there is no point going any further. I would say they do not, as cross-dressing simply describes a behavior, and may also apply to Shakespeare's actors at the Globe theater, Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, or Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire; none of those involve transvestism, in my understanding of that term, which these days is used more in the context of identifying personality disorders. Mathglot (talk) 05:59, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

The main issue that I have with these two articles is that the contents of the articles have a large amount of overlap. If we could keep the article for cross-dressing as the general practice, and transvestism strictly for the medical understanding, that could be a big improvement. That probably wouldn't require a lot of work (if that made sense in terms of direction). Hist9600 (talk) 06:32, 21 February 2023 (UTC)

Let me know sometime if you have any thoughts on improving these two articles. This is something I've been thinking about from time to time over the last few months. Hist9600 (talk) 18:40, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

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